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Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

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Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#51

Post by russelluresti »

laveur wrote: post #18

I am skeptical of "Developer Boot Camps". I think they over promise people that they will be skilled developers when they are done. If you go in with a degree in Computer Science or something that teaches you how to program properly sure you will probably be able to get a job. But the idea to take someone that has never been a programmer and make them suitable for a job is laughable to me. It does a disservice to eve…

I don't think you need a computer science degree to be a programmer, but I share your concern about Developer Boot Camps.

I interview developers pretty often for my company and I've come across about a handful of people whose only education in development was one of these bootcamps; none of them were anywhere close to being ready for even an entry level position.

So I become super skeptical when people are being asked to pay $13k for a 3 month program that may not actually land them a job. That's a LOT of money.

I'd like to see GA's historical track record - how many of their graduates have received offers within 6 months? Within a year? What were the average starting salaries they received?

Based on my limited exposure to the graduates of these types of bootcamps, I don't think I'd recommend this type of program to anyone, despite having Google's name attached to it.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#52

Post by SandB0x »

notsony wrote: post #7

What does Google do with developers who are 40 or 50? What does age diversity look like at Google for engineering staff? Sooner or later this issue is going to come to a head when all the 20-30-something year old Javascript hackers grow older...

Aren't there lots of famous Google engineering staff in that age range? Jeff Dean, Peter Norvig, Rob Pike, etc

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#53

Post by eropple »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #40
eropple wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to rip on you, because I think you're a pretty sharp dude from your posting here, but if you think theory is a waste, I really question what sorts of Actually Hard Problems you've had to tackle. :/

Thanks for the kind words! I'm a high school dropout and have started/ran/sold a startup, managed a division for a well-regarded consulting firm, and worked on data taking for a detector at the LHC. Perhaps the problem is that I minimize the amount of effort that goes into being autodidactic (determine the problem, determine what information and skills are needed to solve the problem, acquire said information/skills,…

YMM, of course, V, but I've used almost everything I ran into in my collegiate CS-related courses in some form or another. And I find that the stuff that I haven't directly used has contributed to my ability to solve problems--having the prerequisites to be able to assimilate into my corpus of knowledge pretty random stuff has served me extremely well. Much more importantly to me, however, I was exposed to things outside of "that computer stuff" that have made me better at being a manager, a leader, and (as hokey as it sounds) a human being. I literally can't put a price tag on it, but I would be vastly poorer as a person without a liberal education that I think gets aggressively discounted when attempting to view college in purely transactional terms. It is a much greater criticism of college, to me, that a student has to go looking for this stuff; the existence of bachelor's degrees that are functionally trade-school materials is troubling to me. I deal with a lot of technical people who are pretty aggressively ignorant of things that don't involve keyboards or oscilloscopes, and I think that is the greater failure of the American collegiate system.

Don't get me wrong--I'm self-taught too, I'd been writing code for a decade-ish before I went to college, but this stuff changed my life profoundly, and I think minimizing it out of hand is downright tragic. Maybe if there was a better way to get people to acquire this a few years on (calling to mind the idea that people should have a few years of experience before getting an MBA), but there isn't right now.

As far as paying a premium goes--I graduated with about $20K of debt, mostly because it was effectively free money (my total interest payments before I paid them off were less than $2K), and was getting paid through school (did Google Summer of Code twice, ran my own web dev shop, etc.). Bad choices can be made with regards to college, but that's a criticism of overly expensive (private) colleges.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#54

Post by laveur »

laveur wrote: post #18

I am skeptical of "Developer Boot Camps". I think they over promise people that they will be skilled developers when they are done. If you go in with a degree in Computer Science or something that teaches you how to program properly sure you will probably be able to get a job. But the idea to take someone that has never been a programmer and make them suitable for a job is laughable to me. It does a disservice to eve…

I see a lot of comments. So Let me clarify I know developing and CS are not the same. I myself am a college dropout. I have no degree but I spent many years in college starting when I was 16. It took me roughly 5 years after I dropped out to get someone to take a chance on me. The point I am trying to make is you can not be taught the basics in such a short time. The theory is so important to what we do. We don't need to turn out people that can code. We need to turn out people that can push our craft further. We are not a commodity!

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#55

Post by eropple »

whiteboarder wrote: post #47
eropple wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to rip on you, because I think you're a pretty sharp dude from your posting here, but if you think theory is a waste, I really question what sorts of Actually Hard Problems you've had to tackle. :/

Who gives a shit? The tech industry currently doesn't need any more people to work on the Actually Hard Problems. The tech industry currently pays people 6 figure salaries to build CRUD apps. There is such a huge shortage of tech people, that the industry can't even get the "Easy", low hanging fruit work done. It doesn't matter how many PHDs work at Tesla designing space cars if the world has a cronic shortage of car…

> The tech industry currently doesn't need any more people to work on the Actually Hard Problems.

I dunno, more people keep offering to pay me to do them than I have time to take up...

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#56

Post by whiteboarder »

russelluresti wrote: post #51
laveur wrote: post #18

I am skeptical of "Developer Boot Camps". I think they over promise people that they will be skilled developers when they are done. If you go in with a degree in Computer Science or something that teaches you how to program properly sure you will probably be able to get a job. But the idea to take someone that has never been a programmer and make them suitable for a job is laughable to me. It does a disservice to eve…

I don't think you need a computer science degree to be a programmer, but I share your concern about Developer Boot Camps. I interview developers pretty often for my company and I've come across about a handful of people whose only education in development was one of these bootcamps; none of them were anywhere close to being ready for even an entry level position. So I become super skeptical when people are being aske…

It depends on the school. The very best ones like Hack Reactor have a 99% rate for people getting jobs within 6 months, averaging at 100k.

The "average" ones are closer to 75k average starting salary.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#57

Post by southphillyman »

wh-uws wrote: post #26
throwaway13337 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a software developer in the modern world (web, mobile) has little to do with computer science. These skills can be taught but aren't in most modern universities. Mostly, there is argument that university is not vocational training. At the same time, most people implicitly feel the need to go to university to get a job. These developer boot camps create a new path. It's a good thing.

"Being a software developer in the modern world... has little to do with computer science." Is a categorical falsehood that has cost me alot of time and money. There is not one top tier technology company software team that you can get on without having a strong grasp of at least the basic fundamentals of CS (namely data structures, algorithms, and some college level math.) You will ALWAYS get passed on if you only f…

We are talking about people who did not learn the fundamentals in college, for whatever reason. For those people I would advise them to get a job first then worry about getting strong in fundamental areas. Experience and employee referrals >>>>>> fundamentals where HR search tool are concerned.

You can learn fundamentals (and see them applied to real problems) while being paid on the job

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#58

Post by copperx »

Hortinstein wrote: post #35
qntty wrote: post #2

Tuition for the 12-week course in Android development, which was designed by Google's developer training team, is $13,500. The full-time course will be offered in early 2016 at General Assembly's flagship offices in New York and San Francisco and then spread to its 14 locations around the world.

meanwhile I am paying ~$8,000 for a full computer science masters from GA Tech (OMSCS). Different class of education, but I feel like I am getting a better deal.

How hard was it to get accepted into the program?

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#59

Post by noxToken »

sbov wrote: post #38
laveur wrote: post #18

I am skeptical of "Developer Boot Camps". I think they over promise people that they will be skilled developers when they are done. If you go in with a degree in Computer Science or something that teaches you how to program properly sure you will probably be able to get a job. But the idea to take someone that has never been a programmer and make them suitable for a job is laughable to me. It does a disservice to eve…

I found that CS theory was great, once I had the practical experience to recognize how to use it. In a sense I feel like we do things backwards. You should work in industry for a couple years, then learn the theory you learn when getting a CS degree. The software development career path isn't setup like this now, but if it were, I feel like we would all be better off.

I don't know if I completely agree with your implementation, but I definitely see where you're coming from. A lot of CS theory felt bland and only useful in academia. It felt like the theory would only be useful if I was doing research and not application. This was especially true with the data structures, discrete maths and automata. It was almost impossible for me to grasp those concepts without something concrete to back it up, and my homework/test grades in those courses reflected that.

Now that I've been developing for a while, everything has fallen into place. I understand Chomsky's hierarchy, the limitations of regular expressions & stacks, time complexity, and the like. It's like development filled in this enormous gap that I had been missing.

Re: Google Launches a Developer Boot Camp, Promising Jobs for Graduates

#60

Post by manish_gill »

segmondy wrote: post #36
laveur wrote: post #18

I am skeptical of "Developer Boot Camps". I think they over promise people that they will be skilled developers when they are done. If you go in with a degree in Computer Science or something that teaches you how to program properly sure you will probably be able to get a job. But the idea to take someone that has never been a programmer and make them suitable for a job is laughable to me. It does a disservice to eve…

Stop it. I think it's really an uncomfortable feeling for plenty of us that someone can learn to program in a few months. It makes plenty of people in the industry free inadequate and I see this argument of yours repeated over and over. It doesn't stand. A developer and a computer scientist are two different things. There are awesome developers who are terrible computer scientists. They can build a great website/smal…

> A developer and a computer scientist are two different things.

No, they are not. A good developer is someone who, by virtue of the fact that he or she has to write software whose theoretical underpinnings are rooted in CS, must be good in CS as well. It's ok if you're not a CS person, but stop generalising and saying no dev has to be.

> There are awesome developers who are terrible computer scientists. They can build a great website/small web application in RoR or Django, fast and get the job done. The site will never scale tho.

No. These are people who are good at gluing together a framework. If that's your definition of a developer, I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but you are mistaken. Web development is not the be-all/end-all of Software development.

Scalability is a very very specific topic, but it's not the only one. CS includes a vast number of things.

Good developers write things like compilers, infrastructure tools, operating systems, libraries, the frameworks that you so like to use - someone wrote them, and chances are, they knew their CS. Video Games - try writing one without knowing much about Linear Algebra. See how far you get.

> Most companies want developers, not computer scientist. You might get asked all sorts of questions about algorithms ^& data structures, but in reality day to day problem is CRUD.

Partly agreed here. The thing is - as the CRUD things become more and more common, everyone wants in on the next stuff - Analytics, Data Science, Machine Learning! Who is going to provide that for the companies? The guy who did dev bootcamp or the guy with a CS degree under his belt who says he can learn it? Who are you going to hire?

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